By Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig
I know that my editors specifically
wanted a Southern writer for the two series I’m writing for Penguin. They do
get the South when they hire me on.
That being said, portraying a specific
region can be tricky. I think dialect
can be annoying to read, if you’re using it broadly. Southerners are fond of dropping gs, for
instance. That would get old after a
while. In fact, if you phonetically
wrote out Southern dialect, it would be incredibly difficult to read.
So what I aim for is using some Southern
vocabulary/colloquialism, and traditions/customs, climate, and common local
settings to help readers take a vicarious trip to the Southern US.
In dialogue, it’s also easier to bring it
out in a natural way. Many Southern women (and some men) use endearments in
addressing nearly everyone—even strangers. That’s something that’s easy to drop
into dialogue.
There are some words that are apparently
too obscure and cause readers to slow down or pop out of the story while they
try to decipher it. That’s not,
obviously, what we want. I’ve had
editors edit out a number of word choices that I didn’t think anything
about. But the reason I didn’t think
anything about them is because I’ve always lived in Southern states. So tote
as a verb went, buggy was quickly
dispatched for shopping cart (a particularly soulless substitution, I
thought), roll in terms of pranking (it
was fascinating having a discussion with my Manhattan-based editor on toilet
papering someone’s yard…it’s roll down
here, but apparently not up there). But
the one that particularly stumped me was when my editor asked me what the heck
an eye was (in terms of cooking). I emailed several friends and family before
responding to her. What else do you call it? You put your pot on an eye and bring the
water to a boil. What on earth could it
possibly be? No one had any ideas, so I
emailed her back and told her it was the black coil on top of the stove. She substituted heating
element. I shook my head over
that one but left it alone.
Traditions or customs are also important
ways to bring a region into your story. Food is hugely important in the South…
it’s not particularly healthy food, either.
So writing in fried chicken and potato salad and ham biscuits and
barbeque (I’ve got a whole series with
barbeque as a hook), pimento cheese sandwiches, black-eyed peas…it all goes in
to give readers a taste of the South.
Customs surrounding weddings and funerals
are thrown into the books, too. The fact that there is a huge food-centric
process to grieving here plays a part in my books (and provides my sleuth with
opportunities to interact with suspects).
The close-knit nature of many extended families in the South, the
willingness to talk with strangers (along with what might seem like a
contradictory suspicion of outsiders in small towns), and the slower pace of life.
Writing a region also involves bringing
in settings where people commonly interact—whether it’s a diner or a ball field, or a church. And it’s difficult to realistically write about
the South without bringing in church somehow, although I don’t touch religion
itself with a ten-foot pole. Actually,
now that I think of it, I’ve had two murders take place at church.
Even the old architecture—houses with big
verandas and space for rocking chairs.
Swimming pools, screen porches, and gobs of air conditioning.
Which brings in another element—the
weather and climate. The long
summers. And humidity that can almost
stop you in your tracks when you walk outside.
Do you focus on a particular region in
your writing? How do you pull a reader
in?
Image: MorgueFile: katmystiry